Spinster du jour

Yes, it's only a TV programme. Yes, there are terrible atrocities going on all over the world. Yes, there are probably other things I could get worked up about. I agree with you. But this is my blog and I have my soapbox right here to climb on. Will the world please leave Susan Boyle alone? I am fed up with the tone taken by most of the media: backhanded compliments and sly mockery camouflaged as admiration. Take the label that's been stuck on her, the Hairy Angel. Imagine you were a teacher or a boss and you heard one of your pupils or staff being called a name like that. You'd cry bullying and discrimination. It's not affectionate or fond. It's spiteful. "Look at the plain spinster. Who'd have thought she had a voice like that?" Why shouldn't she? And if she had a voice like a foghorn with colic, would that make her any less valid as a human being? The media must have wet themselves with joy: middle-aged spinster, living with cat, pottering along quite happily without Touche Eclat and Louis Vuitton. Were people really living like that any more in the twenty-first century? How quaint. Oh yes, let's thrust cameras into every aspect of her life, hold everything up for dissection, then lets drop her when someone else comes along to be chewed up and spat out. I hope she enjoys her time in the limelight. I hope she gets to sing in amazing places, loving every minute, because she has talent and deserves all the good fortune that talent can bring her. But I fear for her, because modern celebrity is merciless. I don't want to see her reduced to living out her life in the pages of glossy magazines, filling the hole left by Jade Goody. Enjoy her singing. Buy her records. Admire her talent and her determination. But don't snigger into your sleeve as you do so.